by Paul Theroux
I found this maddening. I felt the lecture was a task we had to perform and that we would do it well if we were decently prepared. Bruce's moods ranged from somewhat tiresome high spirits to days of belittling gloom. "No one's going to come," he said. "I'm certainly not inviting anyone."
We got in touch with a dozen members of the RGS who had photographs of Patagonia, and we assembled eighty or a hundred pictures of the plains and glaciers, penguins, snow, and storms.
When the day came, it turned out that Bruce had invited many people, including his parents—his big, beefy-faced father had the look of a Dickensian solicitor—and he was miffed that the duke and duchess had not been able to make it. The lecture itself I thought was splendid—one of the happiest occasions of my life in London—not so much for the text but for the atmosphere, the Victorian oddity of it. We gave the talk in the large paneled amphitheater in Kensington Gore, where so many distinguished explorers had reported back to the society. We stood in the dark, a little light shining on our notes while big beautiful pictures flashed on the screen behind us. This was thrilling—just our voices and the vivid Patagonian sights.
There was loud applause at the end. Bruce, who would have been a wonderful actor—who perhaps was a wonderful actor—was flushed with pleasure. He had been brilliant, and I realized that he needed me to encourage him and get him through it. And when I heard him at dinner afterward regaling Lord Hunt and Chris Bonington with his mountaineering exploits, I thought, He's flying!
In our various travels we'd run into each other—in America, in Amsterdam. When he wanted to meet someone I knew well, he simply asked me to introduce him. Graham Greene he particularly wanted to meet. But Bruce thought Greene was gaga. He could not understand the mystique. He loved Borges. Later he needed glamour. He let himself be courted by Robert Mapplethorpe and liked the thought of his portrait appearing in Mapplethorpe's notorious traveling exhibition, along with women weightlifters and strange flowers and even stranger sexual practices.
He went to China—just a magazine assignment, but Bruce made it seem as if he had been sent on an expedition of discovery to an unmapped place by the Royal Geographical Society. I admired that in him. He took his writing assignments seriously, no matter whom he was writing for. He was the opposite of a hack, which is to say something of a pedant, but a likable one, who was fastidious and truly knowledgeable.
When he fell ill soon after his China trip, word spread that he had been bitten by a fruit bat in Yunnan and contracted a rare blood disease. Only two other people in the world had ever had it, so the story went, and both had died. Bruce was near death, but he fought back and survived. Now he had another story to tell at dinner parties, of being bitten by a Chinese bat. A tall, plummy-voiced resident of Eaton Square called me to say, "I just saw Bruce walking through the square carrying a white truffle."
Then the rare blood disease returned. "I was warned that it might pop up again," Bruce explained. What kind of bat was this exactly? Bruce was vague. He became very ill. Seeing him was like looking at the sunken cheeks and wasted flesh of a castaway. That image came to me again and again, the image of an abandoned traveler. The worst fate for travelers is that they become lost, and instead of reveling in oblivion, they fret and fall ill.
When I visited his bedroom in the pretty, homey Oxfordshire farmhouse that Elizabeth tended (she also raised sheep), his hands would fly to his face, covering his hollow cheeks.
"God, you're healthy," he would say sadly. But later he would cheer up, making plans. "I'm going to Arizona to see Lisa Lyon. She's fabulous. The woman weightlifter? You'd love her." And when I prepared to go, he would say, "I'm not ready for the Tibetan Book of the Dead yet."
"He expected to get better, and when he got worse he was demoralized and just let go," Elizabeth told me. "He was in terrible pain, but at the height of it he lapsed into a coma, and that was almost a blessing."
Hovering in this fragile state of health, he died suddenly. He had been handsome, calculating, and demanding; he was famous for his disappearances. His death was like that, just as abrupt, like Bruce on another journey. We were used to his vanishings—his silences could be as conspicuous as his talk.
What Am I Doing Here
Our friendship began like many friendships between writers, with a good review. I liked Bruce's In Patagonia very much and said so in print; he sought me out. He said that after he read my Great Railway Bazaar he was inspired to chuck everything and just clear off to South America. It surprised me that he needed any help at all in anything related to his travel. He was by instinct nomadic. He believed in what he called "the sacramental aspects of walking," and he had more of Ariel about him than anyone I have known. But he also liked the sweet life. He enjoyed glamorous company ("Jackie Kennedy's actually quite nice...")and betrayed his provinciality by being a bit of a snob. He had also worked at proper jobs, at Sotheby's and The Sunday Times, the sort that had allowed him to rub shoulders with the likes of Beatrice Lillie, Diana Vreeland, hard-up aristocrats, and others—the sort of enameled celebrities that make you hanker after the company of a Yaghan Indian or an aborigine, which of course represented the other side of Bruce's social life. Either the drawing room or the bush, nothing in between—or at least nothing that Bruce would admit to.
Very early on he asked me a very Chatwinesque question: what I did not like about his Patagonia book. I said straight off that it bothered me that he never explained the difficulties and in-betweens of travel—where he slept, what he ate, what kind of shoes he wore—and too many sentences of his were like this one: "From Ushuaia it was a 35-mile walk along the Beagle Channel to the Bridges' estancia." Twenty-odd miles is a good day's walk, so was this thirty-five miles easy or hard for him? Did it take a day or more (he suggests a day, surely not possible in Patagonian wind and cold)? And where did he stop? Bruce just laughed at me, because he was an inveterate leaver-out of things. I said I believed that a travel book ought to give enough information for the reader to be able to take the same trip. He didn't think so. I also liked having the right equipment: shoes, poncho, water bottle, sleeping bag, whatever. No, no, he said. Leave it out. He liked making everything connected with travel and his life a bit of a mystery.
All his writing had a fragmentary quality, not in a random sense but in the deliberately isolated way that a paragraph or an incident was a sort of collector's item he had found and worked over and buffed up. It was how he must have dealt with the pretty and precious objects he had seen all the time at Sotheby's auction rooms. He was essentially a miniaturist and, with that, a parer-down of description and emotion, sometimes eliminating them entirely. Even after you have read his six unclassifiable books, you still don't know him, though you know a lot about his world. This is also true of that other traveler and outsider and oblique snob, Wilfred Thesiger.
His posthumous collection What Am I Doing Here (the question Arthur Rimbaud asked himself in Ethiopia after he had abandoned poetry), because it is more ragged than anything else Bruce wrote, tells us more about him—his interests and friends, if not his passions. He writes of his mother and father, of his friend the distinguished painter Howard Hodgkin, and his tête-à-têtes with André Malraux and Nadezhda Mandelstam—you see what I mean by having the right job placing you cheek by jowl with luminaries?
At his best, he gets a really bizarre bee in his bonnet, such as the rumor of a "wolf-boy" in India, or a Chinese fengshui geomancer in Hong Kong, or the notion of looking for a yeti. Then he sets off on a quest to establish the truth of the rumor. Much of Bruce's travel is in search of an unholy grail, something freakish, plainly an excuse, like the dinosaur fragment at the beginning of In Patagonia. Off he goes, and the piece is a winner.
More than half the pieces in What Am I Doing Here are winners, and the others can be classified as anecdotes, fragments, assignments, and bits of odd lore. This last category is a Chatwin specialty. He loved to explain the Nazca Lines in Peru, those gigantic ideograms on the mountainsides. And what
about Joseph Rock in Yunnan, who inspired some of Ezra Pound's dottiest cantos? Or the charade of a West African coup? Bruce gets it all down: how he was slapped, pushed around, imprisoned, robbed, put on trial, starved, and finally released. He leaves with wonderful images and memorable lines and never tells us whether he suffered.
Scattered in these pages are mentions of his rare blood disease. "I was bitten by a bat," he told me enthusiastically after he recovered. It was something of a thrill to him that a bat had sunk its fangs in him, that he had been near death and only survived through a number of blood transfusions. The unusual in travel mattered to Bruce, because this was the stuff of travelers' tales. Travel is also ordinary, monotonous, exasperating, but Bruce never writes about that. Nothing of meals or hotels, tickets or money, only the Ariel-like comings and goings, and the dazzling summaries. I think of this as an English way of traveling—the ability to make one good story stand for a vast, messy ordeal. Such a way of writing can be misleading, because it is also about style and, hiding so much, it is often the opposite of the truth.
Just as seriously—and this is another problem for the English raconteur—the obsession with anecdotes lends a fragmentary quality to Bruce's writing. Narrative structure is sorely lacking, there is little forward movement, and there seems to be nothing at the center—perhaps no real motive. I think Bruce himself suspected this. He hated the term "travel writer," and he was at his happiest mixing fact with fiction.
"What makes Malraux a great figure is not necessarily his verbal performance or his writings," Bruce writes in one of the best pieces in this collection. "His life is the masterpiece."
One can see a real affinity in the young Chatwin talking to the old Malraux in 1974. Revolution, de Gaulle, Mao, China, suicide, history, war, travel, the Bomb, student revolt—it is a wonderful and wide-ranging conversation. Clearly Chatwin admired the man, who was a gentleman, a fine writer, a statesman, a socialite, and, best of all, a man of action—not an homme de bibliothèque, the worst sort of French intellectual. Malraux was also suspected of being a bit of a fraud, of having a dubious side. So what? Bruce would have said. Shady aspects thrilled Bruce and made him more attentive.
Anatomy of Restlessness
Early death is frequently seen as a sort of martyrdom. Bruce Chatwin's tragic death in 1989, at the age of forty-nine, is often depicted that way, and the acolytes who have gathered around his flame have proven to be passionate in advancing the solemn personal myth that Chatwin sometimes helped along and sometimes mocked. Smirk even for a moment at the stained-glass window these people have put together out of ill-assorted chunks of colored glass and you risk being attacked, as I was for the little portrait I wrote of Chatwin a few years after his death.
His audacity was part of his crazy charm. How else could he have gotten along with the likes of Werner Herzog, Robert Mapplethorpe, and (so he reported) Georges Braque? I enjoyed him for his contradictions, but I found that the more he admired someone, the more he talked. I liked being with him, and I was exhausted and grateful when he hurried away—to stay at someone's castle or to observe a fruit bat in Madagascar or, as he tells us in his last collection, Anatomy of Restlessness, to hold "a conversation with André Breton about the slot machines in Reno."
Chatwin insists, in that book and elsewhere, that he spent his life flying by the seat of his pants (a poor student, a muddler, a bit of a con man at Sotheby's). You get the impression that he wants you to contradict him, yet I have no trouble seeing him airborne, whizzing skyward, propelled by only his pants. I think nervousness, not arrogance, made him a poseur. "I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists.... I particularly enjoyed telling people that their paintings were fake," he said.
It was not surprising that such a restless person was a traveler. Some of us are so much happier alone. He was self-conscious in the company of others. He wanted to impress you with something you didn't know: he giddily corrected my pronunciation of "Gouda," and in Anatomy of Restlessness we are told, "The word fetish derives from a Portuguese expression feticceio" — not a lot of people know that, you see. He talked nervously, interestingly; he boasted, joked, gossiped; his mind was always teeming. And then he would need the respite of solitude, or else new listeners.
Needy, yet also self-sufficient, he was mad about contradictions. The beauties of In Patagonia, Utz, and The Songlines are their oddities—the arcane lore, the unexpected incident, the queer etymologies. Of course, Bruce tended to recycle his discoveries. In Anatomy, surely the bottom of the Chatwin barrel, for the umpteenth time Bruce tells us how he figured out the source for the name Patagonia. It was one of his etymological coups.
Quite often Bruce got the wrong end of the stick, but he still managed to build a whole edifice on it. Nomads interested him. He worshiped the nomadic impulse. One of his longest and most complex historical essays on the traveling spirit is built on the fact that "the word Arab means 'dweller in tents.'" But anyone with an Arabic-English dictionary could have told him that, etymologically, "Arab" means "people who express themselves"—derivations of the root arab mean Arabic, a clear speaker, a clarification, an expression—nothing to do with tents. Bruce goes on: "as opposed to hazar"—a man who lives in a house—"with the original implication that the latter was less than human." This again is misleading and untrue.
He had an unstoppable energy for curious inaccuracy. I agree that such waywardness at first blush makes for better reading. But in the long run, the truth is usually very weird indeed, which makes his judgments merely lame. He says that Robert Louis Stevenson is "a second-rater" and Treasure Island is "second-rate." In fact, his elliptical description of Stevenson is like a self-portrait. In one essay he goes on endlessly about the Hsiung-nu, a nomadic central Asian people, but nowhere does he add that they were the avatars of the Huns. Had he done so, he perhaps would not have written, as he does here, "Nomads rarely, if ever, destroyed a civilization."
Anatomy of Restlessness is not a book for people coming to Chatwin for the first time. Those readers ought to start with In Patagonia and work on from there, taking the books chronologically. They are wonderful books. And it hardly matters how he lived his life, except that it was a great deal odder and more interesting than the keepers of his flame are willing to admit. It seemed that he was either the life and soul of a London party or else living in a tent in Wagga Wagga. Of course, the real Bruce Chatwin—hidden, calculating, intensely perambulating—was somewhere in between.
Greeneland
Graham Greene as Otis P. Driftwood
"WHEN THEY WERE WRITING in the Sunday papers about the death of the last Marx brother, one of whose film characters was Otis P. Driftwood," Vivien Greene, Graham's former wife, told his biographer, "I thought, 'That's the name for Graham'—never staying in the same place for more than weeks together."
It is a rum idea, the greatest living novelist as the fifth Marx brother, wearing a funny hat and flapping shoes, with a false nose and an exploding Bible, tripping all over the world—today Berkhamstead, tomorrow Haiti, next week Budapest—Otis P. Driftwood the ambidextrous writer, scribbling novels with his right hand and travel books with his left, and occasionally doing a lifelike imitation of Gustave Flaubert in the French writer's most notable feat, of copulating with a woman, writing a letter, and smoking a cigar at the same time. After all, wasn't it Greene himself who pointed out, in a preface to a volume of his plays, how near tragedy is to farce?
There is something farcical about an authorized life of Greene—indeed, about his having an official biographer. Professor Norman Sherry was once a lecturer at the University of Singapore. I know this because I inherited his office there, and some of his students were passed on to me. Stories were told in the Staff Club (and by the way, this is the tone Sherry himself adopts when writing of Greene) of how, researching the background of Conrad's novels, Sherry would set off for Surabaya, to see whether there had been a real-life prototype for, let us say, Axel Heyst's cook Wang in Victory, or whe
ther there had been three mysterious strangers like those in the novel. Actually, Conrad had nicked the three villains from a minor Robert Louis Stevenson novel, The Ebb-Tide. Sherry was less interested in literary antecedents than those he might find in equatorial back streets, and his eagerness to embrace little-visited countries, exotic people, and the possibility of contracting amebic dysentery so impressed Graham Greene that on the publication of Conrad's Eastern World, Greene got in touch with Sherry and eventually authorized him to write his biography.
The years of a writer's struggle and failure often spell success for the biographer. There is no question but that in his following in the footsteps of Greene's life, and in possession of all the Greene papers, Sherry has lucked out: he has a career, a subject, an income, and he is sole proprietor of the official life.
If The Life of Graham Greene were not so long and so plodding, it would not be necessary to raise these points. At this moment, Greene himself is stonewalling the publication of a racier—unofficial—biography by one Anthony Mockler. Norman Sherry's book is one of those monumental works that appear to be so exhaustive that you are almost certain something crucial is being left out. William Faulkner's biographer also took two long volumes to anatomize a life in which he mentioned every insignificant detail imaginable yet failed to find space for the fact that over a period of about thirty years Faulkner was an ardent adulterer and had a long-standing affair with a woman who apparently mattered very much to him. It is impossible to read Sherry's book without thinking that a similar sleight of hand is being practiced.
A large portion of the first volume of Greene's life (covering the years 1904 to 1939) is given over to the courtship between Graham and his future wife, Vivien. Am I alone in finding it comic that Greene's hundreds of love letters have been sold to and solemnly catalogued by the University of Texas? Sherry offers us many lengthy and gushing passages from these letters (showing a tender, romantic, vulnerable side of the novelist most people regard as a cold fish), but he does no more than suggest that at the same time Greene was living quite a different life—with "tarts," girlfriends, and drifting women. Indeed, any reader of Greene's work can easily guess that he is well acquainted with the one-night stand as well as the protracted affair, and that his libido has had quite a workout over the years. Where it is possible to document Greene's comings and goings, Sherry gives us great helpings, but clearly Greene had not wished to discuss many episodes, and so we are forced to witness the sorry sight of the biographer reading Greene's diary and reporting, "The rest of this entry has been torn out"—or scribbled over or amended or whatever—reminding me yet again that there are often more lacunae in a long book than in a short one.